Hermann Dünow

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Hermann August Wilhelm Dünow (born March 6, 1898 in Berlin ; † September 28, 1973 there ) was a German politician ( KPD / SED ) and resistance fighter against National Socialism . From 1927 to 1933 he was responsible for the security and military policy work of the KPD and, among other things, for the spectacular liberation of prisoners. In July 1933 he took over the management of the anti-military apparatus , the intelligence service of the KPD. After his arrest in December 1933, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1935, which he served in various penal institutions until liberation in 1945. In the GDR he worked from March 1948 to 1955 as editor-in-chief of the magazine Die Volkspolizei and from 1952 to 1956 as deputy head of the political administration at the main administration of the German People's Police in the Ministry of the Interior (MdI). From 1956 to 1958 he was responsible for the MdI's press work.

Life

In the German Empire

Dünow, the son of a metal worker and a washerwoman, attended elementary school from 1904 to 1912 , trained as a plumber in Berlin from 1912 to 1916 and then worked in this profession. In 1916 he joined the German Metalworkers' Association . In 1917/1918 he did military service . He was wounded in France in 1918 .

During the Weimar Republic

After a stay in the hospital in Schlettstadt in Alsace , he was a member of a soldiers' council in Alsace. Dünow returned to Berlin in January 1919. He joined the USPD in 1919 and became a member of the KPD in 1920. From 1920 to 1922 Dünow worked as a plumber at Siemens in Berlin, where he was a member of the works council . In 1922 he was head of the military-political apparatus (short: M-apparatus) of the KPD in Berlin-Neukölln . In 1923 he was a member of the KPD's sub-district leadership there, and from 1924 to 1927 he was a member of the KPD's Berlin-Brandenburg district leadership.

Dünow was one of the founders of the Red Front Fighter League in July 1924 . At the end of 1924 he set up the KPD's intelligence service for the Berlin-Brandenburg district and became its head (code name: "Reinhold"). In addition, Dünow was also active as a journalist and participated in the publication of the KPD's military-political magazine October. Military policy bulletin (pseudonym: "Konrad Funk" / "KF"). Together with Adolf Sauter , he was responsible for the technical and organizational work for printing and sales in October .

From 1927 to 1933 Dünow was responsible for security and military policy work as an employee of the Central Committee of the KPD. In the summer of 1927, Ernst Schneller , who was then the head of the military policy department of the Central Committee, asked him to take over the defense department in the KPD's central M apparatus. Dünow then headed the defense department until the beginning of 1930.

In the spring of 1928, the KPD leadership commissioned Dünow to free Otto Braun from the Berlin-Moabit remand prison . After carefully studying the conditions in the Moabit prison, Dünow decided to use Olga Benario's visit to her partner Braun for the liberation campaign. On the morning of April 11, 1928, Benario paid a visit to Braun, which, as usual, took place in the examining magistrate's room. Shortly after she entered, Dünow followed five other communists into the interrogation room. The group pointed unloaded pistols at the officers guarding Braun and, together with Benario, enabled him to escape. The rescue operation came so surprising that four of the five escape helpers - including Dünow - were able to escape through the side exits.

Encouraged by the successful liberation campaign, Dünow tried in August 1928 to get the communist Rudolf Margies out of the prison in Gerthe (from 1929 in Bochum ). However, the auxiliary sergeant recruited for the action informed the police. Dünow was arrested and sentenced in December 1928 by the Bochum lay judge for attempted bribery of officials to six months in prison, which he served in Bochum.

From the beginning of 1930 to July 1930, Dünow attended - together with Heinrich Fomferra and Paul Gräf - a six-month course at the Comintern's Military Political School in Moscow , after which he was again an employee of the M apparatus, initially as secretary of the military-political department under Hans Kippenberger , who was responsible for the Had taken over the management of the department from Schneller. At the beginning of 1932, Dünow became head of the Iffland apparatus (cover name: "Iduna"), which was responsible for the procurement of illegal offices and quarters, contact points and cover addresses.

In 1932 Dünow and Adolf Sauter tried to forcibly free the sailor Kurt Spital, who had been interned in Wilhelmshaven . Until his arrest in 1931 , the member of the Wilhelmshaven torpedo boat half-flotilla, Spital, who had been smuggled into the Reichsmarine , had provided important information about torpedo and artillery firing exercises, shooting tables, map sketches and orders from the naval command. However, the attempt at liberation failed.

time of the nationalsocialism

In February 1933, Dünow was responsible for organizing and securing the illegal conference of the Central Committee of the KPD in Ziegenhals near Berlin . After Karl Wiehn was arrested on May 8, 1933, Dünow took over the management of the communist passport forgery organization at short notice (May / June 1933). In the summer he was replaced by Adolf Sauter. After Hans Kippenberger's emigration , Dünow became the acting head of the entire intelligence service of the KPD in July 1933. On December 18, 1933, Dünow was arrested together with Karl Langowski through the betrayal of Alfred Kattner . They were arrested by the Gestapo when they were given photos for a passport that was supposed to open up Kattner's emigration to the Soviet Union . Dünow was tortured, while being "fainted into the other". During the first few days of imprisonment, he tried to commit suicide twice, despite the strictest guards. On September 30, 1935, Dünow was sentenced to life imprisonment by the People's Court "for preparing a highly treasonable enterprise [...] committed in a serious offense in forging documents" . The People's Court charged Dünow, among other things, with “high treason” for having been entrusted and involved in procuring secret quarters for the leading cadres of the KPD, including Ernst Thälmann . In addition to Dünow, the employees of the KPD news apparatus Karl Schuster and Arthur Lange were sentenced to three and two years in prison, respectively. After his conviction, Dünow was imprisoned in various prisons: 1935/36 in the Luckau prison , 1936/37 in the "isolation wing" of the Berlin-Plötzensee prison , from 1937 to 1942 in the Gollnow prison (Pomerania) and finally from 1942 to 1945 in the Brandenburg prison. Görden . At the end of April 1945 he was a member of the inmate committee consisting of communists, social democrats, commoners and foreign prisoners. On April 27, 1945, Dünow was liberated by the Red Army .

In SBZ and GDR

In May 1945 Dünow returned to Berlin-Neukölln and rejoined the KPD there in June. In July 1945 he became press officer, then deputy head of the press office at the Berlin Police Headquarters, which was headed by Huldreich Stroh , who before 1933 had worked for the M apparatus of the KPD district leadership in Berlin-Brandenburg. Dünow was there with the search and evaluation of NS files. Under the leadership of Dünow, on behalf of the Soviet military administration, in July 1945 a group of German communists cleared the headquarters of the former Reich Security Main Office on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, which was located in the American sector of Berlin. The group secured files and documents, including original letters from Ernst Thalmann .

From July 1946, Dünow acted as head of the press department of the German Administration of the Interior and was then editor-in-chief of the journal Die Volkspolizei from March 1948 to 1955 and, from 1950 to 1952, of the SED organ in the German People's Police, Our Signal . Between 1948 and 1952 Dünow was an employee of the Polit-Culture department. From 1950 to 1953 he completed a distance learning course at the party college "Karl Marx" of the SED. From 1952 to 1956 Dünow acted as deputy head of the political administration at the main administration of the German People's Police in the Ministry of the Interior (MdI).

In September 1954, Erich engaged Mielke Dünow as a secret informator (GI) for the Ministry for State Security and put him on former resistance fighters. Its use ended four years later. From 1956 to 1958 Dünow headed the Adjutantur of the Ministry as a colonel and was responsible for the press work of the MdI. From 1958 to 1963 he was deputy chairman of the military policy section of the Presidium of the Society for the Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge . In 1959 Dünow retired, but continued to work as a journalist.

On the occasion of Ernst Thälmann's 80th birthday on April 16, 1966, Dünow published information about the arrest of Ernst Thälmann in an article of the New Germany on the basis of prepared Gestapo documents . By naming the garden colony cashier Hermann Hilliges from Gatow as the sole culprit, although, as the historian Ronald Sassning notes, he knew better, decisive circumstances and events had been covered up.

Fonts (selection)

  • The Red Front Fighter League. The revolutionary protection and defense organization of the German proletariat in the Weimar Republic . Publishing house of the Ministry for National Defense, Berlin 1958.
  • Powerful and invincible . Publishing house of the Ministry for National Defense, Berlin 1960.

Essays

  • About the position of the KPD in the Reichswehr in the Weimar Republic . In: Military , Issue 1 (1961).
  • On the history of the German People's Police . In: Series of publications by the German People's Police , Issue 6 (1962), pp. 542–554.
  • Against individual actions - for revolutionary class struggle . In: Germany's immortal son. Memories of Ernst Thälmann . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1981, pp. 317-326.

Awards

Movie

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ List of Abbreviations. Retrieved December 9, 2018 .
  2. ↑ T. Derbent: Clausewitz et les structures militaires du KPD (1920-1945). (PDF; 33 kB)
  3. ^ Siegfried Grundmann: Adolf Sauter. Communist, traitor, undercover agent of the Gestapo and other services - stages in a career . In: International scientific correspondence on the history of the German labor movement , Issue 2/3 (2006), pp. 169–236 (here, p. 170).
  4. ^ Hans-Rainer Sandvoss: The "other" capital of the Reich. Resistance from the labor movement in Berlin from 1933 to 1945 . Lukas, Berlin 2007, p. 389.
  5. ↑ Bernd Kaufmann: The KPD's intelligence service 1919–1937 . Dietz, Berlin 1993, p. 162.
  6. ↑ Bernd Kaufmann: The KPD's intelligence service 1919–1937 . Dietz, Berlin 1993, p. 163.
  7. ↑ Bernd Kaufmann: The KPD's intelligence service 1919–1937 . Dietz, Berlin 1993, p. 191.
  8. ^ Hans-Rainer Sandvoss: The "other" capital of the Reich. Resistance from the labor movement in Berlin from 1933 to 1945 . Lukas, Berlin 2007, p. 389.
  9. ^ Siegfried Grundmann: Adolf Sauter. Communist, traitor, undercover agent of the Gestapo and other services - stages in a career . In: International scientific correspondence on the history of the German labor movement , Issue 2/3 (2006), pp. 169–236 (here, p. 170).
  10. ^ Siegfried Grundmann: The secret apparatus of the KPD in the sights of the Gestapo: The BB department: functionaries, officials, informers and spies . Dietz, Berlin 2008, p. 209.
  11. ^ Siegfried Grundmann: Richard Großkopf and the communist passport forger organization . In: International scientific correspondence on the history of the German labor movement , Heft 4 (2004), pp. 423–464 (here, p. 439).
  12. ↑ Ronald Sassning: Thälmann, Wehner, Kattner, Mielke. Difficult truths . In: UTOPIE Kreativ , issue 114 (April 2000), pp. 362-375 (here, p. 372).
  13. ^ Siegfried Grundmann: Richard Großkopf and the communist passport forger organization . In: International Scientific Correspondence on the History of the German Labor Movement , Issue 4 (2004), pp. 423–464 (here, p. 444).
  14. ^ Certified copy of the judgment of the People's Court against Hermann Dünow
  15. ↑ Peter Przybylski: Perpetrator next to Hitler . Brandenburgisches Verlagshaus, Berlin 1990, p. 127.
  16. ↑ Klaus Mammach: Resistance 1939-1945. History of the German anti-fascist resistance movement in Germany and in emigration . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1987, p. 280.
  17. ↑ Michael Kubina: "In a form that does not reveal what it is about ..." On the beginnings of the party's secret and security apparatus of the KPD / SED after the Second World War . In: International scientific correspondence on the history of the German labor movement , Issue 3 (1996), pp. 340–374 (here, p. 346).
  18. ↑ Peter Monteath (Ed.): Ernst Thälmann. Man and myth . Rodopi, Amsterdam (Atlanta) 2000, ISBN 90-420-1323-0 , p. 101.
  19. ^ "For a socialist fatherland - life pictures of German communists and activists from the very beginning", Military Publishing House of the GDR, 1981, p. 62
  20. ↑ a b Ronald Sassning: Thälmann, Dünow, Wehner, Mewis. Pictures with etchings (PDF; 174 kB). In: UTOPIE Kreativ , issue 115/116 (May / June 2000), p. 559.
  21. ↑ All my life. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed October 7, 2016 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
personal data
SURNAME Dünow, Hermann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dünow, Hermann August Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (KPD / SED) and resistance fighters
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH September 28, 1973
Place of death Berlin